LG BD390 is my new Toy

So this weekend Best Buy was having a sale on the LG BD390 and I had to bite. I've been waiting for the price to drop from $400 to something more reasonable. I guess $329 (plus tax) was the magic number. Of course I may head for the refund counter if I don't end up loving it overall.

As I was playing around with my new toy, one feature high on my list of things to try was the Netflix streaming. That's when I was greeted with the message (pictured above) saying my Internet is very slow. Huh? I don't thinks so! However, no matter whether it's been on the PC or a device like this, I prefer a real DVD to the streaming. Let's just leave it at that.

Another disappointment for me in this player was it didn't recognize the iPod compatible mp4* files I had on my external USB drive or the WTV files on my Windows Media Center PC. And why does the remote control not have a backlight? I like watching movies in the dark you know! The last annoyance I can think of is the absence of the word "Bitstream" in the audio selection. Instead it's called "Primary Pass Through".

On another note, this player puts out a very nice picture. For the price it certainly offers more features than a Sony model. The menu system is so easy a caveman technically challenged person could do it. And the startup time for the player from power up to playing the movie is about 30 seconds! Much better than ever.

Time will tell (30 days) if I will keep this player or not. The extra features are nice, but it does boil down for me to speed, picture and sound quality.

* AUG 27, 2009 – Correction: mp4 files that have the .mp4 extension work fine if you change it from .m4vSEP 08, 2009 – Returned it this weekend. Maybe I'll go for the less expensive LG BD270, also has the quick-startup feature.

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3 Comments

I got one 3 days before you. I ended up running a wire to the thing since the wireless was not solid enough. The Netflix works VERY well, and my speedtest.net says 6.24Mbps. We have watched maybe ten films, and nary a hiccup. One was “HD”, but I’m not sure what that really means to Netflix – didn’t seem that great.
Worst thing I have noticed is that, even wired its terribly slow to look at content on my computer. We got a new camera and each photo is about 5MB. Its about 6 secs to load each. If I do the same to a PC using a 100M wired computer on my network, its damn near instant. I took my 1G NIC PC up stairs and hooked it up to the CAT6 I ran, and sure enuf I get 1G conneciton, so seems like the LG is just slow to convert the pictures to the TV format.
Also, it often cannot read the .jpg files, also videos, even tho they use the same codec ( .vob ) – some have no sound, and some won’t play.

@MarkG – Thanks for sharing that. In my post I should have mentioned that my connection was hard wired also. You even did CAT6, which is all good, but HD uses about 1/3 of what CAT5 can do. Either way it’s strange the LG doesn’t seem to tap into it. Hopefully a firmware update will make it better.
Since I get more mileage from my Vista Media Center PC (soon to be W7MC), back went to the store my player. Someone without an HTPC may find more use for it though. It still is a very good Blu-ray player regardless.